The Vermont Law and Graduate School Center for Agriculture & Food Systems (CAFS) partners with organizations nationwide, working with them to solve law and policy challenges in pursuit of a more sustainable, just, and equitable food system.
The Center for Agriculture and Food Systems develops tools and resources for food and agricultural stakeholders across the country. CAFS Projects and CAFS Guides provide law and policy expertise to the efforts to build a more sustainable, just, and equitable food system. One good example is the Healthy Food Policy Project. It includes a curated, searchable database of 421 healthy food policies at the local level around the United States with filters by jurisdiction type and by food system category.
In the CAFS Clinic, one of the nation’s only law and policy clinics focused solely on food and agriculture, students gain practical experience and networking opportunities.
Set within a top-ranked environmental law program, CAFS offers degrees and courses with a unique systems-based focus on food and agricultural law and policy. A sampling of CAFS courses.
What's the Beef? Debates Over Cell-Cultured Meat explores the questions facing federal and stare regulators about how these products should be labeled.
Rethinking Manure Biogas: Policy Considerations to Promote Equity and Protect the Climate and Environment dives into the existing policies incentivizing manure biogas operations, the environmental justice impacts of locking in existing systems of industrial animal agriculture, as well as alternative methods of capturing livestock emissions.
Towards Equitable and Just Food Systems explores terminology used to describe efforts to create just and equitable food systems. It features definitions, policy examples, recommended reading, perspectives from leaders and activists, and discussion questions to prompt conversations.
Addressing Consolidation in Agriculture analyzes the changes in USDA rulemaking to increase domestic competition in agriculture.
Essentially Unprotected: A Focus on Farmworker Health Laws and Policies explores gaps in U.S. laws and policies that put farmworkers at risk. It draws from a survey of federal and state laws, focusing on pesticide exposure and heat-related illness, and offers recommendations for policies that are urgently needed to protect farmworkers.
The State of Prison Food in New England: A Survey of Federal and State Policy examines the laws and policies that shape food in New England’s publicly operated correctional facilities. It offers recommendations for advocates and policymakers to ensure nutritious and safe meals while improving how prison food is sourced and served.
Building Resilient Local Meat Supply Chains: How On-Farm Slaughter Fits into the Federal Meat Inspection Act examines how federal and state meat inspection laws have exempted on-farm slaughter practices, and what more cam be done to support these operations.